The Care of Time (11 page)

‘You know Zander?’

‘We’ve known him for a long time, but not always as well as we’d have liked. Nowadays, he’s what we call a handle-with-care package.’

He had always had a taste for a trade jargon. ‘Meaning what?’

‘Meaning that he’s one of those individuals with whom we prefer not to have direct dealings of any sort. The reasons can be operational or, as in this case, chiefly political. We prefer to keep some characters at arm’s length. It’s nothing new or very special. When Dieter Schelm’s outfit has that particular problem he calls in us or maybe the
British. On this one we’ve asked Dieter to help out.’

‘To deal with a book?’

‘Not just any book, Bob. Have you read these memoirs?’

‘Have you?’

‘Not me personally, but apparently that nice Mr McGuire had a photostat of the original Russian that he didn’t mind our people seeing back home. What he told us about your deal with Zander, though, had them worried. So did some other things.’

‘What things?’

‘Things like you concealing evidence, Bob. The FBI and Captain Boyle were concerned about you too. Your agent’s office didn’t know where you were. We had to get your secretary to help us find that Zander letter in your workroom. She said you always put papers you didn’t want her to see in the bottom right-hand drawer of your desk. That’s where we found the postcard from Baghdad they tell me. So, realizing that you’ve unwittingly involved yourself in something you can’t fully understand, we decided to offer you the helping hand.’

‘Bullshit.’

He went on with the faintest of smiles. ‘We also hope, of course, that in return for our good offices in taking care of the FBI’s understandable displeasure at your efforts to obstruct justice, we get a small measure of co-operation from you in respect of Zander.’

‘Thanks, I’ll take the FBI’s displeasure, if any. I’ll also apologize to Captain Boyle. He’s a reasonable man. As for your helping hand and your good offices, I don’t have to tell you what you can do with them. You’ll think of some place suitable.’

He rolled his eyes at Schelm and sighed heavily. ‘As I told you, Dieter, little old Bob here is a hard man.’ He looked at me again. ‘The second reason I’m here is that your personal file gives you a suspicious nature and a long memory for bad breaks. So, having assured our friend Dieter Schelm that you are indeed the Robert R. Halliday we all know and love, I will
also vouch for his credentials. He is a very senior official of a West German intelligence service, though at present on loan to Nato as director of their Combined Intelligence Services Liaison Bureau. Dieter Schelm is a civilian with the assimilated rank for Nato admin purposes of a two-star general. He speaks Oxbridge English so you needn’t worry. Your jokes will be understood.’

Schelm offered his hand. ‘How do you do, Mr Halliday.’

The family doctor impression that I had of him went the moment our hands touched and when I really saw him. He could have been a doctor, but not the kind traditionally associated with good bedside-manners, childbirth and house calls. The disqualification was in his eyes. There was great intelligence there and even humour, but no hint of compassion. It was only the half-glasses that gave him, now and then, an odd look of professional benevolence.

He glanced at the familiar face and said, ‘Thank you, my friend.’

It sounded like a dismissal and evidently was. The face said something to him in German that I didn’t quite understand and then turned to me. ‘Well, Bob,’ he said, ‘this is as far as I go. It’s good to see you looking in such great shape. I hear you’ve given up pretty well everything the health nuts don’t recommend. It shows. If there’s anything you want from us, you know where to find me.’ He gave us a comprehensive farewell wave, gathered up a canvas tote bag along with his topcoat and left.

As the door closed I went to the telephone. ‘The first thing I propose to do,’ I said, ‘is to call room service and find out what they have in the way of food at this time of night. You may be thirsty too. What can I get you to drink?’

They both asked for Pellegrino. While I waited for room service to answer, I scribbled
ROOM PROBABLY BUGGED
on the phone pad and held it up for Schelm to see.

He smiled pleasantly and nodded. When I had finished with room service, he said: ‘You’re right. It was bugged. But your acquaintance from the American embassy brought
along a portable detection device they have now and the bugs were dealt with while we were waiting. Otherwise there could not have been so much plain speaking. What made you think that this room might not be secure?’

So I told them how I had been taken out of the hotel and gave them a run-down on my evening with Chihani and Zander. I stopped while the room-service waiter delivered the drinks and snacks, but the only other interruptions were those caused by Pacioli’s outbursts of indignation.

I did, though, find out from him about the autostrada on which you paid twice.

‘That would be the A8 and A9 going north,’ he said. ‘They start as one. You pay entering that first section because there are several free exits from it along the way. But if you go on as far as Varese, say, on the A8 or Como on the A9 you must pay more. You could also on the A8 have taken the left branch that goes nearly to Arona. Did you see nothing at all of the route you took?’

‘Nothing, Mr Pacioli. That’s what I keep trying to tell you. Inside the minibus I couldn’t see outside, either coming or going.’

‘I am sorry. It is all so disgraceful and you are our guest. Please continue. You say the man calling himself Luccio received you wearing only a bath robe in this hotel to which you were taken?’

Schelm was a better listener. He did not interrupt once.

‘I think it is only fair to tell you,’ I said finally to Pacioli, ‘that, although I don’t much feel like having another wrestling match with this hotel’s night operator, I’m now going to put in a call to my agent in New York. And I’m going to tell her that our deal’s off.’

His long face grew longer. ‘May I know what reasons you will be giving, what justification for trying to break our agreement?’

‘Misrepresentation will do for a start. I’m not saying you were responsible, but, according to McGuire, my job, the main job that is, would be to edit Luccio’s material. There is
no Luccio material. All I’ve had from Dr Luccio is violence, double-talk and his personally-edited English translation of the Nechayev memoirs. They’re in that envelope over there, all two hundred pages of them, quadruple-spaced. Only get this, please. McGuire told me that Luccio’s belief in the authenticity of the memoirs rested on his personal knowledge of their provenance. Luccio, he said, had inherited them. Luccio himself says that’s wrong. He bought them. That I can believe. He bought them from whoever faked and forged them.’

‘You have not yet proved faking and forgery, Mr Halliday.’

‘I don’t think I have to prove it,’ I said. ‘You haven’t met this man. You told me so yourself. I have met him and I say that the burden of proof is now on you.’

‘I don’t think that either of you is going to have to prove anything,’ Schelm said cheerily. ‘You say, Mr Halliday, that he gave you his personally-edited translation of the memoirs? May I look at it?’

‘Help yourself,’ I said. ‘I’m still curious to know why the CIA and Nato intelligence get themselves all excited over some phony nineteenth-century memoirs and a wheeler-dealer from Estonia, but I guess that’s all going to turn out to be classified information.’

He smiled politely but gave no reply as he went over to the desk and picked up the envelope. ‘I take it,’ he said to me, ‘that Luccio hasn’t yet been told of your decision to break your contract to work with him?’

‘No.’ But I had hesitated and he pounced at once.

‘Did you perhaps hint? Please be very frank. This is important.’

‘I was trying not to sound too chicken. Okay, I’ll be frank. I thought of telling him, but I didn’t. For one thing, he and his little entourage scare me. Two, I didn’t know where I was, where they’d taken me. For
me
that was scary as well, believe it or not. Third, my agreement is with Casa Editrice Pacioli, not Zander. Fourth, Syncom-Sentinel is in a better
position to get police protection for Mr Pacioli while he’s telling Zander that the party’s over than I am. Fifth – do you need a fifth reason?’

Pacioli shook his head but Schelm fluttered the envelope he was holding to regain my attention. ‘Mr Halliday, I would like to hear all your reasons please. It will help, when I start answering your questions, not to be telling you things you already know.’

‘Okay. Fifth reason. I’ve met a lot of people wanting to get into print or have their names on books, and I have a pretty good idea by now of the various ways in which their minds work. Now, I’m not claiming that I know how a weird mind like Zander’s works, but I’m sure of one thing. Whatever he wants, it isn’t a book.’

‘Quite right. Anything else occur to you?’

‘It wasn’t easy to read in the back of the cab, but coming into the city the street lighting and neon signs helped. That copy of the Nechayev memoirs you’re holding is supposed to be an English translation with only the French passages left untranslated. That’s not what it is. There are several long passages of untranslated stuff that doesn’t look like Russian or French. Could be one of these computer languages, I guess. I marked one or two of them by folding the pages in.’

‘Those,’ said Pacioli, ‘must be the French shorthand system pages. Our experts could not decipher them into any familiar language.’

‘They’re not in shorthand here,’ I said.

‘And the language has nothing to do with computers.’ Schelm took the script out of the envelope and flipped through to one of my folded-in pages. ‘Excuse me please.’ He smoothed the page out and stared at it thoughtfully.

‘What language is it?’ I asked.

He ignored the question but glanced at his watch. ‘I think, Mr Halliday, that it is by now after office hours in New York.’

‘I have my agent’s home number.’

‘Would you consider postponing your decision to call her for a few more minutes?’

‘What for?’

‘I’m told that you were curious to know why Zander insisted on you and no one else being employed to work with him on this book. I have the explanation. Would you still be interested in it?’

‘For a few minutes, yes.’

He sat down again, shifting his chair slightly to face me, and peered at me over the half-glasses. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ he asked.

‘Not a bit. Go ahead.’

He nodded as if he had won a bet with himself. ‘Thank you, Mr Halliday. The reasons for personal antagonisms can sometimes be quite trivial. It was very obvious that the sight of your old acquaintance from the American embassy gave you no pleasure. He smokes a lot. You don’t. It was just possible that …’

‘No, Herr Schelm. There’s nothing trivial about my reasons for disliking him. All that cheap cigar smoke just reminded me of them.’

‘I see.’ He leaned forward. ‘I should explain that we and his section in your embassy often exchange information.’

‘Then he must be a CIA chief of station now.’

‘When I asked him about you, Mr Halliday, he told me that although his people would not object to my asking for your co-operation I was unlikely to get it.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me.’

‘You were, of course, formerly a newspaper man, a foreign and a war correspondent.’

‘Yes.’

‘You may say that it’s none of my business, but I do know that, once upon a time, the Agency used now and then to ask correspondents to help out in small ways.’

‘Now and then it did.’

‘Forgive me for asking these very personal questions, Mr Halliday, but I suspect that this cigar-smoking person whom
you dislike may have been your case officer when you had that unfortunate experience.’ He was peering at me intently. ‘Am I right?’

‘Unfortunate did you say?’ But I was beginning to like him, so I hesitated and the sarcasm I had been about to utter was left unsaid.

He understood though. ‘No, Mr Halliday, I don’t always choose my words very well. Nowhere in the world are prisons nice places, but eight months in an Iraqi security-police jail would be an exceptionally bad experience. You would not be disposed to forgive the person you considered responsible.’

‘You seem to know all about it. Who told you? I’m sure he didn’t.’

‘The story was in the Cairo newspapers at the time. It’s the first item in our BND dossier on you.’

‘What that story said was that I was accused of attempting to bribe a government official and of smuggling gold to compromise a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Don’t tell me you believed it.’

‘Do
you
still believe all you read in the papers?’ His sudden smile and the faint chuckle that went with it were somehow cheering. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘a section of the Arab press outside Iraq carried the story with the added information that you were a CIA agent. The clamp-down on that came from the Iraqis themselves. We wondered why. Usually they are ready to blame the CIA for everything bad, from a measles epidemic to an earthquake. Why would they neglect a real chance of compromising the Agency?’

‘There was egg on some very important faces. They’d been so busy netting the little fish – me – that they let the big one get away. Their security brass boobed and there had to be a face-saving cover-up. I didn’t enjoy that. They had to pretend that I was a big fish until the fuss had died down and they could throw me back.’ I broke off. He had begun to nod understandingly. The man was a trained interrogator and I was chattering. ‘What does all this ancient history have to do with Zander?’ I asked abruptly.

‘The reasons he picked on you to work with him are that you are a respectable journalist and writer and that you also have a private line to the CIA.’

‘Nonsense. I have no such thing.’

‘You may not like it, Mr Halliday, but the truth is that you have.’ He tried without much success to look as if he knew exactly how I felt and fully sympathized. ‘You once carried out an assignment for the Agency. Most regrettably that fact is public knowledge. You choose to speak of it as ancient history, but think. Using highly unconventional methods, Zander is able to draw the Agency’s attention to you again. As a result, your former case officer has re-established contact with you and now placed you in touch with me under secure conditions. You may dislike him and his employers, with some justification maybe, but I respect them. On Nato’s behalf I work closely with the Agency in those areas where our interests coincide. If you think that this re-establishment of old contacts and the making of new has not been anticipated and counted upon by Zander, you underrate him. His methods are, I admit, bizarre, but only when judged by western standards. Prolonged contact with the Arab world often has this effect. Even the most level-headed European businessmen can find themselves acquiring bizarre and convoluted thought habits.’